We left Devil’s Island last night and began our sail from French Guyana to our first landfall in Brazil. We welcomed another sea day which gave us a chance to catch up on our photographs and correspondence.
The day was punctuated by several very informative presentations including one from Tom Lovejoy, one of our Global Perspectives Speakers on this voyage, who talked about the history of the Amazon. Tom has spent his life studying the Amazon and its ecosystem and is the world’s foremost expert on the region. We enjoyed another presentation on the interaction between the Amazon and its surrounding tropical oceans. The Amazon River is larger than the next seven of the world’s largest rivers combined and its discharge represents 20% of all the river discharge on the planet, so it has a large impact on the nearby ocean and the ocean affects the basin in return. Vincente Pinzón, the first European to sail into the Amazon estuary called it El Mar Dulce, “The Sweet Sea,” because of the volume of fresh water.
In the afternoon we had a presentation by Wade Davis, another of our Global Perspectives Speakers, on the plants of the Amazon, particularly those with psychoactive and medicinal properties.
We have now begun to see Brazilian fishing boats with their design typical of the entire country, setting their gill nets in the shallow waters of the continental shelf which is only 10-20 meters deep even though we are out of sight of land.
